In for a penny, in for a pound. I've gotten lots of responses from friends about my pitch to lighten up on the goodly number of Brits, and others, as well, who were making such a big deal out of the death of a grandmother, as I chose to frame the event of Elizabeth II's passing. It's interesting how a once very minor concern - the use of a monarchy to represent a nation - has become a topic people are responding to. It's not a new topic, but an old one being revisited in some new intriguing ways.
I felt it was unworthy to buy into the fiction that a human being is indistinguishable from the nation for which she is a stand-in. I saw her first as a person and secondly as somebody assigned a burden most of us would find too heavy to carry. A burden (I'm projecting here, of course) in no way compensated for by the castles and the jewels, the perks and the women curtseying right and left. I felt a discussion of the value of the monarchy should be left to another day.
Well, the queen is buried and the period of official mourning is over with. Bring on the discussion.
At first sight, there are far more consequential issues to concern ourselves with. There are hurricanes in Nova Scotia and Florida, both affecting family members of mine, for starters. There's Mussolini's granddaughter carrying on his fascist tradition in Italy, other fascists carrying on in Hungary and Poland, and the U.S., where the Republican Party's doing its damnedest to scuttle democracy. The Covid pandemic. Immigration. The energy crisis. Global warming.
Friend Barbara just gave me a reason to keep the focus on this peculiar habit of using human beings as instruments of state a bit longer. She linked me to a marvelous piece from the London Review of Books from nine years ago by the British writer, Dame Hilary Mantel.
When Mantel was young, she suffered from endometriosis, which left her, at age twenty-seven, with the devastating reality that she would never have the choice to have children. Coming face to face with her own vulnerability as a woman gave her a new perspective on, among other things, women whose lives are lived within the confines of a monarchy. She concluded that the creation of a monarchy was, in fact, just one more example of the instrumentalization of women's bodies. The primary task of a monarch is not to tap you on the shoulder and make you a knight; it's to produce children.
The article in the London Review from nine years ago I'm referring to is entitled "Royal Bodies." It has a new relevance with the death of Elizabeth II. You can read it, but I recommend you sit back and listen to Hilary Mantel's reading of it in her own voice. Either way, it's brilliant writing. Let me give you a sample. Mantel was at Buckingham Palace once and watched the queen walk by:
And then the queen passed close to me and I stared at her. I am ashamed now to say it but I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones. I felt that such was the force of my devouring curiosity that the party had dematerialised and the walls melted and there were only two of us in the vast room, and such was the hard power of my stare that Her Majesty turned and looked back at me, as if she had been jabbed in the shoulder; and for a split second her face expressed not anger but hurt bewilderment. She looked young: for a moment she had turned back from a figurehead into the young woman she was, before monarchy froze her and made her a thing, a thing which only had meaning when it was exposed, a thing that existed only to be looked at.
Mantel has gone deep into British royal history, has written extensively of the Tudors. Of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII. But also of Diana and Kate Middleton and how the former didn't fill the bill but the second seems to be doing splendidly. But mostly how the institution really ought to go the way of all institutions destructive of human rights, especially the right to choose one's own path in life.
As I've stated before, I cannot go along with all those who view the luxuries royals have as compensation for their necessary surrender of their personhood to the uses of the state. My view is that material wealth may bring great satisfaction for a time. But if one has a soul, sooner or later one has to realize what has been taken from them. Hilary Mantel says it much better than I could:
Is monarchy a suitable institution for a grown-up nation? I don’t know. I have described how my own sympathies were activated and my simple ideas altered. The debate is not high on our agenda. We are happy to allow monarchy to be an entertainment, in the same way that we license strip joints and lap-dancing clubs...
... Harry doesn’t know which he is, a person or a prince. Diana was spared, at least, the prospect of growing old under the flashbulbs, a crime for which the media would have made her suffer.
... We don’t cut off the heads of royal ladies these days, but we do sacrifice them, and we did memorably drive one to destruction a scant generation ago.
Living in Japan I had the opportunity over the years to hear from a number of women and men who had no say in choosing a spouse. In village culture, where everybody knows everybody, so the argument goes, it makes sense for parents to match their children with the children of peers, choosing practical criteria in making the decision, and not love or passion, as young people are wont to do. Love is something, they say, that comes with time, as people sacrifice for their mates, their children, and the good of the community. People accommodate this demand, and take on the communal value.
But how many of us who do not live in this cultural milieu would accede to this practice? The royals of Britain are fully western in their value system. True, if you are raised to think and act like a prince, you might well find yourself going with the flow, as a majority of royals clearly do. But is there a justification for it, other than to keep a pre-democratic tradition alive?
On the other hand, Americans have learned by bitter experience what can happen when you put the roles of head of state and head of government into the same person. The head then can begin to take on too much importance. Maybe the monarchy system isn't such a bad escape valve, after all. That's the issue, ultimately. At what price can we justify using others like ourselves for political ends? At what cost do we turn away from that system, which has, after all, worked out pretty well in other nations:
Is it that the idea isn't so bad that with a little tinkering it can be made less onerous?
Watching the spectacle has been a journey. I began by finding it unbecoming to fault a single individual for the evils of the British Empire, especially at a time when thousands were inclined to mourn that individual's passing - including family loved ones.
And have ended up feeling that we've got this backwards: we should not fault the queen at all. Instead, we should be asking ourselves what sort of non-democratic impulses we harbor in ourselves that give us a reason to use human beings as instruments, rather than an end in themselves.
Give a listen to what Hilary Mantel has to say. She makes my case in a far more entertaining way than I ever could.
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